A Parking Lot Thought in 17 EDO

A Parking Lot Thought in 17 EDO.

A Parking Lot Thought is a motet I wrote in my first semester of music theory. I had entered the score into Sonar some time ago and grabbed it to try making a choral piece that sounded drone-ish for the ImprovFriday drone theme this week. See this link to watch the 12 EDO video.

At the same time I have been starting to study 17 edo in a more systematic fashion. So I decided to “translate” the 12 edo motet into 17 edo. This is not a simple retune. I first to make life easy I chose 12 notes out of 17 that I was going to use. This way I kept a 1:1 relationship with score. The tuning I chose follows with the 17 edo scale degree in (parentheses):

! C:\Cakewalk\scales\17et.scl
!
12 of 17 cjv ET
12
!
70.58824 (1)
211.76471 (3)
352.94118 (5)
423.52941 (6)
494.11765 (7)
635.29412 (9)
705.88235 (10)
847.05882 (12)
917.64706 (13)
1058.82353 (15)
1129.41176 (16)
2/1 (17)

Since the motet stays in one key this type of translation was not much of a problem. As I listened to the piece and edited the score the biggest change I made was to change the C3#’s to C naturals. The score as a PDF file is here. Since this is in 4 piece part writing the piece is contrapuntal and I made some changes to make more of the harmony functional in 17 – even in 12 at this point in my classical composing career some of the progressions in 12 equal didn’t work quite right. Nonetheless this is a step in the direction I wish to go in with 17 edo – analyzing and developing 17 edo harmonic / melodic contrapuntal technique.